Yesterday we published an article explaining what viewability is and how it’s measured. Since this is an always interesting topic we decided to expand a bit more on the subject and talk about viewability in video.

To recap - viewability is the metric that helps advertisers track how many of their impressions were actually seen by users. Although there are different techniques to measure this, it is widely accepted that an ad is considered viewed if at least 50% of it was visible for at least 1 second.

Is this the case with video advertising? No entirely. It’s actually even more interesting when we speak about video ads.

When it comes to video ads there are different ways to measure if the ad was viewed:

Was it in-view? - this is actually related to the popular standard we mentioned above - at least 50% of the ad must be seen for at least 1 second, and the same applies for video ads too.

What was the completion rate? - this metric looks at one of the most important things when it comes to video advertising - how much of the video was watched compared the full length of the video? Did the video play only for 3 seconds, or did it continue further and for how long actually? As you might guess the introduction of autoplay had a serious impact on this question. With autoplay a video is automatically played to the user and apart from causing surprise to the user, it could also give misleading information to the advertisers. There are few reasons - for example, the video could’ve been played at the bottom of the page, which doesn’t guarantee that the user scrolled down to watch it. Also, for some vendors even if a video is played for 1 second (thanks to autoplay) it could be considered viewable. This definitely goes against the objectives of the advertisers to share their message with their audiences.

Was the video delivered with audio? - actually yes, many advertisers rely on the audio message, as well as the colourful shots, to relay their message to the users. So it only makes sense that audio is important metric to track the viewability of a video ad. Some vendors get even specific in the audio level as well - the video should be delivered with the sound at least 10% of max volume.